Let me see if I understand your thesis. You think we shouldn’t anthropomorphize people?”
-- Sidney Morgenbesser to B. F. Skinner
As far as I’ve I can tell, this never happened.
Perhaps your understanding of “anthropomorphic” is too narrow?
EY said (above):
Behaviorism was the doctrine that it was unscientific for a psychologist to ascribe emotions, beliefs, thoughts, to a human being.
This is the basic myth. Skinner fought very hard to demonstrate that this was a gross mischaracterization of behaviorism.
EY said (above):
But for the behaviorists to react to the sins of Freudian psychoanalysis and substance dualism, by saying that the subject matter of empathic inference did not exist…
Which behaviorist? Where? When?
Added: I found it difficult to track down primary source material online, but behaviorism-as-denial-of-mental does not seem to be a straw depiction. I was able to track down at least one major behaviorist (J.B. Watson, founder of behaviorism) saying outright “There is no mind.”
This should make plain why Watson was never behaviorist poster boy material. I wouldn’t even call him a “major” behaviorist.
Eliezer_Yudkowsky (EY) said (above):
As far as I’ve I can tell, this never happened.
Perhaps your understanding of “anthropomorphic” is too narrow?
EY said (above):
This is the basic myth. Skinner fought very hard to demonstrate that this was a gross mischaracterization of behaviorism.
EY said (above):
This should make plain why Watson was never behaviorist poster boy material. I wouldn’t even call him a “major” behaviorist.
As a psychology student, I can say with some certainty that Watson is a behaviorist poster boy.